Blog

So tomorrow (really later today since its basically early morning) is the start of a long weekend for me in terms of competing. This weekend will more or less be for fun and to judge my conditioning at this point in the season. I have not been able to practice as much as I would have liked so I do not have super high hopes of setting many records.

Tomorrow afternoon thru Saturday morning, I will be competing in the Ohio Wheelchair Games in Columbus, Ohio. I used to compete at the Ohio Games every year, but when I went to college it was much harder to make it in town and I only made it after my freshman year. I got the registration form in the mail a few months ago and decided it would be fun to do again. I started looking at the events I would want to do. I decided on doing field events (shotput, discus, javelin) that I havent done in 5 years, track events (100, 200, 400, 800, 1500, 5000m), and swimming events (will be doing the 500yd freestyle for the first time in competition along with some other races). I have not swam competitively in a pool in 5 years either so I have been recently practicing things such as flip turns but I might end up just doing a regular touch turn because Ive been less than stellar on some of my flip attempts.

There is an award ceremony on saturday night starting around 8 pm but I will not be attending that. I instead will be heading back home right after the swimming ends. When I get back to cincinnati, I will be heading straight over to Coney Island to pick up my race registration because I am crazy enough that I am doing a duathlon on Sunday morning. For those of you who do not know, a duathlon is a triathlon without the swimming. Instead of doing swim, bike, and run, it will be run, bike, and run. This race is just a sprint distance so I will be doing a 5K run (aka 3.1 mile push), 30K bike (18.6 miles), and another 5K run. I had originally planned on doing the sprint triathlon because it is a pool swim and I had never done a pool swim for a triathlon before. I found out a few weeks ago, from a nurse while at the hospital, that they do not fill the pool until like the week before the race so the water is usually between 55 and 60 degrees on race day. This is incredibly cold water and pretty much requires the use of a wetsuit. I have never used a wetsuit before and did not have time to rent one and try it out so I did not want the first time using one to be on race day. For the run and bike legs of the race I do not know a whole lot about the course. I know the bike leg is mostly along kellogg Ave. which is fairly flat so it should be a fun ride. I have been told that the run legs are all on pavement but I do not know if that means it will be on roads or on narrow sidewalks with lots of turns. I guess we will see on sunday.

I will try to post again after I do everything but there could be a bit of a delay. I found out earlier today that I have a job interview up in chicago on tuesday afternoon, so I will be busy sunday getting ready to leave on monday to head up there. I will be staying at my sister's place on monday night so that I do not have to get up crazy early and drive from Cincinnati to Chicago on tuesday morning.